A constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world.
Like much of Lerner’s work, the book is full of uneasy divisions ... Can be uncannily beautiful ... The flickering between worlds—call it reënchantment—that Lerner seeks is, after all, not merely a game. We might want very badly to be in the presence of people who are gone ... [An] astonishing title poem ... This poet, who has dreamed himself awake, need not choose between the safety of the familiar and the thrill of the alien. To live in the world, his poem tells us, is already to know more than we can say.
In Lerner’s works, we see how producing speech, an act we take for granted, has shaped the conditions of modern life, engendering precarity and wonder, paranoia and disbelief. These concerns are alive throughout his new collection of poetry ... The Lights might be the best showcase for Lerner’s set of themes: Here we find a book caught between the puzzle of prose and poetry, public and private speech, past and present. Lerner is not merely cerebral; he is the rare writer who is hilarious no matter what form he is working in ... Like his earlier work, The Lights leaves me wondering how anyone could come away from Lerner and end up thinking he’s so miserable and mean. It’s clear he is having fun and laughing at himself.
Lerner is a chewy writer, his language nearly synesthetic. You can taste it in your mouth ... He’s also a shape-shifter, moving gracefully between past and present, often within a line or two ... All these voices moving through the overlapping timelines.
